


It's All in the Family

by Paper0wl



Series: Rod and Shield [11]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Supernatural, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Badassery all around, Being a Superhero is not as fun as it sounds, Dean is Bad at Feelings, Episode: s07e13 The Slice Girls, Gen, Idjits, Kyria is Not Amused, Maybe she is, NINJAT is not Standard Operating Procedure, Natasha is Not Impressed, Oblivious Dean, Post-Iron Man 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-16
Updated: 2014-10-16
Packaged: 2018-02-20 14:02:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2431466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paper0wl/pseuds/Paper0wl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is having trouble coping with the ongoing threat of Lilith. Kyria Morningstar is having trouble dealing with friends having trouble coping, since they all seem to insist on endangering themselves. (She's not pissed at Stark - why would she be pissed at Stark? It's not like he exposed himself to a dangerous terrorist without support of any kind. Oh wait, he did.)</p><p>This isn't the first time she's gone head-to-head with an army for her friends. It probably won't be the last either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's All in the Family

**Author's Note:**

> Next up is Thor: The Dark World. If I ever finish it. I haven't finalized the order _or_ the events. And saying we're off script is being generous. Very generous. A whole new tangent popped up yesterday.
> 
> Anyone know where I can get a beta?

Sam examined the latest body in the morgue, not paying much attention to the coroner’s assistant as he wondered what was keeping Dean.

“What triggered the Feds’ involvement in this case?” Charlene Penn asked him, startling Sam. “I always think you boys have bigger fish to fry.”

“No. Actually, we – we – it’s – “

“This raised flags with some cold cases on file,” a familiar voice answered, coming to his rescue. “These murders are nearly identical to ones in Chicago and Miami. If it _is_ the same killer, crossing state lines like that is sure to get the FBI’s attention.”

Penn raised her eyebrows at the newly arrived pair of agents. “Enough for _two_ teams of agents?”

“Nah,” Kyria replied amicably, shaking her head. “He may be FBI, but _we’re_ SHIELD. Agents Lux and Talley.”

“Detective Charlene Penn, I was running lead here before the federal alphabet threw up on the case. And here I thought SHIELD was even bigger than the FBI. Shouldn’t you two be out hunting internationals spies or aliens or something that doesn’t involve wasting my time?”

The mostly-in-the-closet-alien-superhero grimaced. “Don’t believe everything you hear on the news. We’ve got far more office drones than superheroes. If you can even call them that. But one of the bodies in Chicago was ours.”

Penn gave a disinterested look. “Yeah. Whatever. You’re gonna have to wrap this up. Your case isn’t the only one we’re working on.”

“We don’t mean to be an imposition, and I can assure you I want this wrapped just as much as you, Detective,” Kyria said with remarkably believable sincerity. “Some days I think my boss purposefully tries to bury me under all the paperwork this sort of thing generates.”

The detective gave her a hard look before nodding briefly and leaving.

“You get used to her,” Eddie offered.

Kyria turned away from the empty doorway and shrugged at the forensic examiner. “I’ve had to deal with worse. Now, I believe my colleague would like a copy of the files?”

Sam blinked, realizing she was talking about him. “Yeah. Um, I, uh, didn’t bring the cold case files with me.”

When Eddie turned his back to grab the file, Sam gave Kyria a _look._ She raised an eyebrow and beside her, Jake shrugged, managing to convey _hey, don’t look at me._ Then the tech was back and Sam had to pay attention to business. As much as he really wanted to know what Kyria was doing here, he wasn’t about to shirk his investigation. Even if Dean seemed to be doing just that.

Talking with Eddie turned up a lead that suggested Dean’s new favorite bar wasn’t quite what it seemed. Great. As if being on constant demon red-alert wasn’t enough. Now he had to _extra_ reason to worry about his brother. 

Sam was just about ready to burst out of his skin by the time he and the SHIELD agents got out of there.

“What are you doing here?” he asked the first chance he got.

Kyria shrugged. “One of the Chicago bodies _did_ have SHIELD ties, but that city’s such a supernatural mess that nothing ever came of it. _Then_ I got a call from Bobby saying you were on a case and I should, and I quote, ‘get out there and knock some sense into their idjit skulls before I have go and do it.’”

Sam flinched. It wasn’t that he _meant_ to mostly-avoid Bobby – or anyone for that matter – but he kind of had his hands full keeping Dean from freaking over Lilith more than absolutely necessary, especially when he was having nightmares about the same. 

Being Lucifer’s True Vessel was a lot easier to deal with when there wasn’t someone running around trying to make that be more than just an unfortunate title.

“Yeah,” Kyria continued dryly. “But I’ll wait until I’ve got you _and_ your brother before I start with that.”

***

Upon returning to the hotel room, Dean barely paused to say “hi” before dragging Sam into a discussion about one-night stands and multiple mysterious kids named Emma. Jake sprawled on the couch and tried not to smirk too noticeably as Kyria waited for Dean to dig himself into a hole.

“Dude, I know weird,” Dean continued. “Okay? There is no non-weird explanation for this.”

Kyria coughed.

Dean didn’t seem to notice. “This morning, Emma was a baby. By sunset, she’s Hannah Montana. Early years.”

Kyria coughed again.

“You want some water or something?” Dean asked. “Cause I’m kinda freaking out here and your coughing isn’t helping matters.”

“It shouldn’t,” she said blandly. “Bobby identified the symbol as belonging to a tribe worshipping the Greek goddess Harmonia. What you’re dealing with here are Amazons.”

“Amazons?” Sam repeated.

“Like Wonder Woman?” Dean remarked.

Sam winced as Kyria scowled. “Days like this I regret ever agreeing to be a superhero. Yes, Wonder Woman was an Amazon, but not like this. These Amazons are an exclusively female tribe of warriors with no use for men whatsoever, except for procreation.”

“All the vics were male,” Sam noted.

Kyria transferred her scowl to him. “Thank you for stating the obvious. I don’t know how you managed to survive this long on your own.”

“Hey!” Dean exclaimed. “We do just fine on our own!”

“Really? And that’s why Bobby sent me to slap you upside the head? Cause you’re doing just fine? Just like Stark was doing ‘just fine’, right?”

It was Jake’s turn to wince. He hadn’t been present for that particular confrontation, but he’d heard about it. The best sound-proofing money could buy was no match for Kyria when she was Justifiably Pissed. 

“What’s Stark got to do with this?” Dean demanded.

Kyria crossed her arms. “Surely you remember the news from Christmas? A certain billionaire decided to confront an unknown enemy _by himself,_ without notifying anyone or asking for help. Next thing you know, his house is falling into the ocean and he’s missing, presumed dead. And it’s only when Pepper calls me in tears that I find out he’s been having trouble dealing with the fallout from New York.”

Dean wasn’t impressed. “Yeah, and? The guy’s fine. Came back, saved the president, stopped the bad guy, got another medal. Woo-hoo.”

“What fallout?” Sam asked.

She pursed her lips. “Apparently suicide runs to hand-deliver nukes to alien armies when he’s finally got a support team looking out for him, coupled with crazy revelations about angels and demons, broke what terrorists in the Afghan desert couldn’t. He kept himself sane the first time by building himself a flying suit of armor and blowing up terrorists like the ones who hurt him. With science doing a woefully inadequate job so far of quantifying angels and demons and Stark being too much of a stubborn ass to talk about what’s _actually_ bothering him, he managed to work himself into a state closely resembling PTSD. I already ripped into him for trying to bury that and I’ll do the same to you.”

“We’re fine!” Dean countered angrily.

“Yeah? Bobby’s worried about you because you’re fine? You’re taking hunts all over the country, running yourself ragged because you’re fine? Hell’s out to get you, Heaven set you up, and you’re _fine?”_

“Yes! We are!”

“Dean – “

“I already apologized for Lilith getting out. _And_ promised, in no uncertain terms, that Lucifer’s not touching Sam, even over my dead body. What more do you want, Dean? There is no magic reset button, and even if there was, Chuck’s doing an awfully good job of showing how much worse things _could_ be going down. Which, I’ll admit, rather freaks me out. But life sucks. That’s an immutable fact. And in my experience, it sucks less when you’ve got people to help. Why aren’t you letting them?”

Dean clenched his fists and glared daggers at Kyria. If looks could kill, Jake would be the only agent of SHIELD still in the room. But then, if looks could kill, Kyria would have lit more than a few paperwork fires by now, and she’d already proven she was damn difficult to kill, so she really had nothing to worry about, and that might explain why she stared right back until the hunter blinked first. “I don’t want to make them into targets.”

Kyria made a rude noise. “They are grown adults who know full well what they’re getting into. Not letting them make their own choices makes it seem like either you don’t trust their choices or their opinions don’t matter. That’s a great way to make yourself friends, Dean.”

“I want to keep them safe!”

“And cutting them out doesn’t do that,” Kyria countered fiercely. “It just means they don’t have all the information they need. You’re endangering them with what you’re doing and you’re endangering yourself.”

“And how exactly am I doing that?”

Kyria’s smile was strained. “Congratulations, Dean. You are the proud father of an Amazon.”

Judging by the dumbfounded expressions both Winchesters were wearing, Jake was the only one who saw that coming.

***

What followed was a freak-out session to rival the “oh my God, demons are real and I’ve got the blood of a demon who is trying to end the world” panic Jake had been a participant in. Admittedly, finding out that a one-night stand resulted in a pregnancy that turned into a homicidal teenager in under a week deserved a freak-out.

“Angels and demons wanting to send me to Hell to end the world was bad enough. But now . . . I have a kid. A . . . a crazy man-killing monster kid.”

“She’s not a man-killer yet,” Sam pointed out.

“Yeah. Because she’s supposed to kill me! How fucked up is that? I find out I have a kid but she’s supposed to kill me? What’s up with that?”

“If this is the sort of shit you handle regularly, I’m amazed you haven’t cracked yet.” Jake shook his head. 

“Now you see why I spend so much time on the hunting network,” Kyria replied. “A lot of them _are_ batshit.”

Jake found himself nodding. “That’s a good way to put it. I don’t know how else you could explain Rufus.”

Kyria shrugged. “Rufus isn’t so bad. Bribe him with Johnny Walker Blue.”

“He’s got good taste,” the former soldier admitted. SHIELD might be unusual for government agencies, and NINJAT might be unusual for SHIELD (only like three upper echelon bigwigs even _knew_ the ninjas even _existed_ and one of _those_ was officially dead and sometimes the cover-ups within cover-ups made his head spin) but bribing senior experts to _be_ senior experts couldn’t be normal. Right? 

The sad thing was he wasn’t sure anymore. Involuntarily going AWOL to be thrown into what was supposed to be a death match and ended up being a transfer/job/something-he-hadn’t-looked-too-closely-at-the-paperwork-for had severely distorted his sense of normal. And _that_ sort of thing _was_ normal for SHIELD. Or so he heard. Admittedly, anything Barton said was suspect, but he _did_ kind of have a point there.

“Can we get back to what we’re doing about the fact I’m next on the soon-to-be-dead list? Cause I’m not okay with that!”

It looked like Kyria _wanted_ to roll her eyes, but managed to refrain. “If the pattern holds, you should be fine until tomorrow night. In the meantime, we apply standard Ninja Protocol.”

Sam was intrigued. “You have a standard protocol for this sort of thing?”

She made a helpless shrugging motion with her hands. “As standard as a secret department that technically doesn’t exist within a not-quite-so secret agency gets. We get to them before they get to us, offer them the increasingly popular ‘Join Us or Die,’ and be prepared for the worst case scenario.”

For a secret department that technically didn’t exist within a not-quite-so secret agency, NINJAT used the “Join Us or Die” line fairly often. Of course, “join us” was taken as highly flexible and mainly translated to “stop killing people.” As a super-strong human with a splash of demon blood, Jake could safely say he was _not_ the most unusual person to have been folded into NINJAT.

“How are we supposed to find a cult of man-killers?” Dean demanded.

Kyria smirked. “I call the tail I put on Detective Penn.”

“She’s an Amazon?” Sam said in shock. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I can tell with these things. Consider it a non-human radar. At point blank range, I can usually determine species. Useful in pinch. Like knowing who to tail back to the lair. Yes, I did just call it a lair.” Dean snapped his mouth shut on whatever it was he was going to say. “And now if we can all pretend we’re rational adults for a bit, shall we come up with a better plan than going in there waving guns, proclaiming ‘join us or die’?”

***

Striding purposefully through the door into the warehouse where the Amazons were currently laired wasn’t altogether dissimilar from getting on the Avengers’ plane to the Battle of New York. If anything, after the swift transition from “unimportant agent” to “national superhero,” staging a confrontation with an army of supernatural warriors was mild by comparison.

All the women looked up when she entered, followed closely by her entourage of two hunters and an agent. As first through the door and the only woman in the group, Kyria wanted no doubt that _she_ was the one in charge. The Amazons might take her seriously; at best they would ignore a hunter.

An older, dark-haired woman that Kyria pegged as the leader after scanning the room settled into a cautiously wary stance. “Is there a problem here?” the Amazon asked.

“Yes,” Kyria replied in a calm, even tone as she took note of the warriors on the edges of the room subtly shifting into attack position. Or what they thought was subtly anyway. 

The Amazon leader raised her eyebrows. “Oh? And what sort of problem do you imagine there is?”

Casually predatory, Kyria smiled. “Well, if I was given to fantastical supposition, I might speculate that a friend of mine had fallen victim to a mythological tribe of warrior women who wanted to kill him for siring one of their next generation. And if that was the case, I might feel obligated to do everything in my power to protect him.”

“And how might you think you would be able to protect your friend from this . . . mythological tribe of warrior women?” the Amazon asked archly. “I don’t imagine, say, four people, would be able to stand against an entire tribe.”

“You’d be surprised,” Kyria said amicably. “Seven people stood against an army in New York.”

“We’re not in New York,” the matron countered.

Kyria was the only one who didn’t flinch when the door behind her slammed open and Detective Penn fell through.

“I was,” Natasha announced, stepping over the unconscious body of the Amazon. “So was Kyria.”

“Kyria?” the Amazon leader repeated, looking toward her.

She gave a self-deprecating shrug. “That would be me. Kyria Lux, called Orion, called Morningstar, agent of SHIELD.”

“You never used to admit to the Morningstar part,” Natasha noted idly, leaning against the wall with the boneless grace of cats and dancer-assassins.

“Yeah, well, that was before my codename headlined in the aftermath of New York. I worked out a lot of issues on the Chitauri.”

“Morningstar,” the Amazon matron repeated, a hard edge to the word.

Kyria’s casual ease vanished, replaced by time-hardened, iron resolution. “Yes. The Morningstar Abomination, Spawn of Satan, Hell’s Almost Princess, Hell’s Absent Princess, First and next-to-Last of the Nephilim, that’s all me. More importantly, I’m the one with a friend who unknowingly fathered a Daughter of Harmonia, and while not opposed to it, I’d much rather avoid genocide as the course by which I save his life.”

The Amazon looked at their group thoughtfully. “Which one is your friend?”

“All of them,” Kyria returned sharply. “Though the father is Favored of Michael.”

The flinch was minute but detectable. 

“His brother is meant to carry Lucifer,” she continued, to a deeper flinch. “I’ve found their family to be focal points of supernatural activity; they attract more undue attention than two dozen ordinary hunters.”

The other woman’s eyes widened at _hunters._ “That is unfortunate,” she agreed with a frown. 

“Yeah, well, that’s life. Or at least life when grand destinies are pushed into play. What are you gonna about it?”

The Amazon pursed her lips. “What would you suggest?”

At that moment, one of the women burst in motion, launching herself toward Kyria with a knife in her hand. Several women ducked as glass shattered and the attacker cried out, dropping the knife because an arrow stuck out of her arm.

As those assembled alternated between staring at the arrow and staring at the window, Kyria smirked. “Not trying that again, for starters. He’s called Hawkeye for a reason. And introductions might be a good idea as well. I have with me Black Widow, Agent Jake Talley, and Hunter-Consultants Dean and Sam Winchester. You just met Hawkeye. Dean is part of the reason I’m here.”

“Madeline,” the Amazon said grudgingly.

“Under the circumstances, you’ll understand if I’m not exactly pleased to meet you. But now that we’ve gotten the basics out of the way, perhaps we can come to some sort of an arrangement that allows me to act in my role of negotiator and not executioner, yes?”

***

“Did SHIELD just contract an army?”

“Clint.”

 _“Natasha._ I’m serious. It looks like our esteemed colleague swung a paternity claim into a reserve army for SHIELD. Which is something only Kyria could pull off. Maybe Phil, actually. Any idea when Fury’s gonna stop pretending he’s dead by the way? Because while Kyria _says_ he’s alive, I’m pretty sure even she hasn’t talked to him yet.”

“Since I doubt you asked, I take it you’re back in the air ducts?”

“Testing security procedures, Nat. The vents are terribly insecure. Even the ones above Fury’s office.”

“This is why she’s kept you off base, you know. Because even without being compromised, you blow through security protocols and clearances enough to worry the people in charge.”

“But I need to know all the office gossip. Like who Wong is seeing on the side. Or what McCarthey says about Dr. Foster. Or that time her intern had six PhD’s in tears.”

“This is what SHIELD pays you to do with your time?”

“Yeah. They know I explore the ductwork. If they want me to stop, they should get better security. Speaking of, did you know Pepper wrote a letter of recommendation for some little high school kid?”

“The Vietnamese boy who interned with her last summer? Yes, I was aware.”

“And you didn’t tell me? Nat, I’m hurt.”

“Why? You seem to have no difficulty learning such things on your own. You can’t expect me to not make you work for your information after all.”

“Okay, fine, I’ll bite. Why did Pepper have some random intern? And more importantly, why did Stark _let_ her?”

“Ask Kyria. I have to go supervise the disappearance of SHIELD’s new NINJAT army.”

“Ask – wait – _Nat!”_


End file.
